University of Virginia Library

18. CHAPTER XVIII.
THE UNITIES DISREGARDED.

THE admirers of Aristotle must bear with us while we
take a little liberty: that, namely, of violating all the
unities.

Fourteen years had slipped by since the great steamboat
accident; fourteen years, pregnant with forces, and prolific of
events, to the far-reaching influence of which no limit can be
set.

In those years a mechanic named Marshall, while building
a saw-mill for Captain Sutter in California, had noticed a
glistening substance at the bottom of the sluice. Thence the
beginning of the great exodus from the old States, which soon
peopled the auriferous region, and in five years made San
Francisco one of the world's great cities.

In those years the phenomena, by some called spiritual, of
which our friend Peek had got an inkling, excited the attention
of many thousand thinkers both in America and Europe.
In France these manifestations attracted the investigation of
the Emperor himself, and won many influential believers,
among them Delamarre, editor of La Patrie. In England
they found advocates among a small but educated class; while
the Queen's consort, the good and great Prince Albert, was
too far advanced on the same road to find even novelty in
what Swedenborg and Wesley had long before prepared him
to regard as among the irregular developments of spirit power.

“Humbug and idiocy!” cried the doctors.

“A cracking of the toe-joints!” said Conjurer Anderson.

“A scientific trick!” insisted Professor Faraday.

“Spirits are the last thing I 'll give into,” said Sir David
Brewster.

“O ye miserable mystics!” cried the eloquent Ferrier,
“have ye bethought yourselves of the backward and downward
course which ye are running into the pit of the bestial
and the abhorred?”

“How very undignified for a spirit to rap on tables and talk
commonplace!” objected the transcendentalists, who looked for
Orphic sayings and Delphian profundities.

To all which the investigators replied: We merely take
facts as we find them. The conjurers and the professors fail
to account for what we see and hear. Sir David may give or
refuse what name he pleases: the phenomena remain. Professor
Ferrier may wax indignant; but his indignation does
not explain why tables, guitars, and tumblers of water are
lifted and carried about by invisible and impenetrable intelligent
forces. We are sorry the manifestations do not please
our transcendental friends. Could we have our own way,
these spirits, forces, intelligences — call them what you will —
should talk like Carlyle and deport themselves like Grandison.
Could we have our own way, there should be no rattlesnakes,
no copperheads, no mad dogs. 'T is a great puzzle to us why
Infinite Power allows such things. We do not see the use of
them, the cui bono? Still we accept the fact of their existence.
And so we do of what, in the lack of a name less vague, we
call spirits. There are many drunkards, imbeciles, thieves,
hypocrites, and traitors, who quit this life. According to the
transcendental theory, these ought to be converted at once, by
some magical presto-change! into saints and sages, their identity
wholly merged or obliterated. If the All-Wise One does
not see it in that light, we cannot help it. If He can afford to
wait, we shall not impatiently rave. It would seem that the
Eternal chariot-wheels must continue to roll and flash on,
however professors, conjurers, and quarterly reviewers may
burn their poor little hands by trying to catch at the spokes.

“I did not bargain for this,” grumbles the habitual novel-reader,
resentfully throwing down our book.

Bear with us yet a moment longer, injured friend.

During these same fourteen years of which we have spoken,

the Slave Power of the South having, through the annexation
of Texas, plunged the country into a war with Mexico for the
extension of the area of slavery, met its first great rebuff in
the establishment of California as a Free State of the Union.

The Fugitive-Slave Bill was given in 1850 to appease the
slaveholding caste. Soon afterwards followed the repeal of
that Missouri Compromise which had prohibited slavery north
of a certain line. It was hoped that these two concessions
would prove such a tub thrown to the whale as would divert
him from mischief.

Then came the deadly struggle for supremacy in Kansas;
pro-slavery ruffianism, on the one side, striving to dedicate the
virgin soil to the uses of slavery; and the spirit of freedom, on
the other side, resisting the profanation. The contest was long,
doubtful, and bloody; but freedom, thank God! prevailed in
the end. Slavery thus came to grief a second time; for the
lords of the lash well knew that to circumscribe their system
was to doom it, and that without ever new fields for extension
it could not live and prosper.

One John Brown, of Ossawatomie in Kansas, during these
years having learnt what it was to come under the ban of
the Slave Power, — having been hunted, hounded, shot at, and
had a son brutally murdered by the devilish hate, born of slavery,
and engendering such dastardly butchers as Quantrell, —
resolved to do what little service he could to God and man, by
trying to wipe out an injustice that had long enough outraged
heaven and earth. With less than fifty picked men he rashly
seized on Harper's Ferry, held it for some days, and threw old
Virginia into fits. He was seized and hung; and many good
men approved the hanging; but in little more than a year
afterwards, John Brown's soul was “marching on” in the song
of the Northern soldiery going South to battle against rebellion,
until the very Charlestown where his gallows was set up was
made to ring with the terrible refrain in his honor, the echoes of
which are now audible in every State, from Maine to Louisiana.

Slavery first showed its ungloved hand at the Democratic
Convention at Charleston in 1860 for the nomination of President.
Here it was that Stephen A. Douglas, the very man
who had given to the South as a boon the repeal of the Missouri

Compromise, was rejected by the Southern conspirators
against the Union, and John C. Breckenridge, the potential and
soon actual traitor, was put in nomination as the extreme pro-slavery
candidate against Douglas. And thus the election of
Abraham Lincoln, the candidate pledged against slavery extension,
was secured.

This election “is not the cause of secession, but the opportunity,”
said Mr. Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina.
“Slavery shall be the corner-stone of our new Confederacy,”
said Mr. A. H. Stephens, Confederate Vice-President, who a
few weeks before, namely, in January, 1861, had said in the
Georgia Convention: “For you to attempt to overthrow such
a government as this, under which we have lived for more than
three quarters of a century, with unbounded prosperity and
rights unassailed, is the height of madness, folly, and wickedness,
to which I can neither lend my sanction nor my vote.”

After raising armies for seizing Washington and for securing
the Border States to slavery, Mr. Jefferson Davis, President
of the improvised Confederacy, proclaimed to an amused and
admiring world, “All we want is to be let alone.”

Peaceful reader of the year 1875 (pardon the presumption
that bids us hope such a reader will exist), bear with us for
these digressions. In your better day let us hope all these terrible
asperities will have passed away. But, while we write,
our country's fate hangs poised. It is her great historic hour.
Daily do our tears fall for the wounded or the slain. Daily do
we regret that we, too, cannot give something better than words,
thicker than tear-drops, to our country. But thus, through
blood and anguish and purifying sufferings, is God leading us
to that better future which you shall enjoy.